1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to communications within a client-server computer network and, in particular, to a method of recording and measuring information about a particular communication session between a client application and a server application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Doing business in an electronic manner is highly advantageous. An electronic business or so-called "e-business" is one that uses certain tools to connect its critical business systems directly to employees, customers, vendors and other important constituencies. An "intranet" is an e-business application deployed within a business. An "extranet" is an e-business application deployed within the larger community of a business, including its suppliers, vendors and contractors. Connecting either one to the Internet's World Wide Web makes the information it contains accessible from anywhere using conventional browser software.
A goal of e-business is to move online all processes that require a dynamic and interactive flow of information. These include, without limitation, service and support, managing supply chains, buying and selling, and the like. Examples of an e-business application include Internet banking or Internet retail sales.
Because an e-business application running on a Web server may have to support a large number of interactions in a given time period, measuring and tuning the performance of the application is an important goal. Similarly, because reliability and functional correctness of the e-business application are paramount, functional and system testing of the application are also important elements of the development process. Also, if an individual user of the e-business application encounters poor response time, it may be important from a customer service viewpoint to be able to quantify and measure the exact nature of the user's performance difficulty in order to resolve the problem. Such measurements should concentrate on the delay of the server as it interacts with the user as opposed to measuring performance characteristics of the client machine (e.g., how long it takes the browser to render the servers response on the client machine).
An important part of performance measurement and system testing of an e-business application is the problem of capturing a test workload. A test workload is a set of URL requests that take place between a client application and a e-business application during a simulated or "sample" interactive session involving the application. A test workload, theoretically, could be replayed to the server for performance measurement or functional testing purposes. The prior art, however, does not provide any adequate means or method of compiling such workload information. A possible solution is a manual "monitoring" technique, wherein one could just watch the URLs that the browser submits and copy these URLs down by hand in order to create a list of requests to the application (i.e. a "request list"). For most e-business applications, however, the URLs are complex and hard to read due to "URL encoding". Copying the requests down by hand is thus extremely error prone for all but the simplest of e-business applications.
Thus, there remains a need to provide a technique to monitor and record information about specific requests to a server application, such as an e-business application, to thereby generate "workload" information that may then be used for later playback to benchmark the server application.